Ben Southwood

Why is it so hard for restaurants to expand? So often do I have a meal at the second or third branch of a chain and find it lacklustre or not up to the standards I built up in my mind. And yesterday’s meal at Zelman Meats in St. Paul’s, the fourth branch of the proto-chain, was yet another case where the latest outpost of a restaurant brand did not impress me.

First, I’ll be clear that I really like and endorse what the whole group around Zelman is doing. I’ve never been to Goodman, and given that Knife in Clapham has the same hard-to-get meat supplier and costs half the price, I probably never will go, but it seems like what you want from a high-end steakhouse. I loved Rex & Mariano and when it was cruelly taken from us, I was a fan of its replacement, the original Zelman Meats in Soho. London needs more steak restaurants that don’t cost an arm and a leg. Basically, this restaurant group has its heart in the right place, and often delivers the goods.

And if Zelman Meats’s city branch was a cheap and cheerful Flat Iron affair, I’d probably be recommending it heartily. But if you’re going to spend at least £100 on dinner and drinks between two, you expect something special, at least if you’re me, and special is what Zelman didn’t deliver.

Look, maybe tempura does technically include any type of batter, I am no expert, but what I am expecting when I am offered tempura prawns is the gloriously light-coloured and light-textured batter familiar to all who have had it once. This was more like beer batter. Beer-battered prawns are a perfectly good thing, although these were slightly overcooked, but it is always frustrating when you don’t get what you expect.

As usual, the “holy fuck” mayo was basically just orange mayo, and I would have preferred that the lime flavour was in there, as wetting the batter with the lime segments sacrifices some of its crunch, and never gives you the distribution of flavour as you’re hoping for.

The burrata was a bit better. Smaller than the gigantic lumps you’re used to, but cheaper too, and that’s probably an overall better trade. I’d say it was considerably less wet and creamy, and therefore more like regular mozzarella than I’ve had before, but it did the job. The only real problem was a severe lack of the promised pesto (you can barely see it in the picture)—just a smearing underneath. Give us a bit more and let us decide if we want it all!

The chips ranged from excellent to completely undercooked. As ever, the parmesan and black truffle topping is a great idea, but I had an unshakeable sense that it was less truffly than I remembered. Obviously in a dish like this I don’t expect big thick shavings onto my plate—I’m only paying £8.50—but this had a great truffle smell without much of a discernible truffle taste. Maybe it was the end of a jar.

On the other hand, both sauces—béarnaise and chimichurri—were great. The chimichurri was a bit different to what I am used to (mainly because it was blended) but I found myself dipping and dipping till it was all gone.

But I’ve gone all this time without talking about what you came for, the steak. Now the good is that you buy per 100g—chateaubriand is £9.50/100g, and picanha is £6.50. That above is 300g of each, which is about enough for two people.

The steak was not bad. But we paid nearly £50; for that, it needed to be excellent—it needed to be worth five flat iron steaks from Flat Iron! And it just wasn’t.

Firstly, it was cooked inconsistently. There were big veins of grey “gradient” in the chateaubriand (left) around the nice medium rare parts, and the two end pieces were grey, tough, and grainy. Even if you are committed to grilling your steak from start to finish, there is no need for this, and if you are willing to cook the middle and the outside separately you can get perfect end to end medium rare every time. I can do it myself!

And secondly, it lacked flavour. Yes, we had sauces, but good steak tastes really good on its own. Chateaubriand is £25/kg (vs Zelman’s £95/kg) in Turner & George, the best butcher near me, and tastes really beefy. Obviously I do not object to restaurants charging more for food—they prepare it for me—but they are not adding anything close to £70 of value. Or they weren’t yesterday.

And so I left Zelman having had some decent, adequate stuff, but spending £42 a head for two courses without so much as a sip of booze. That’s not big bucks but it’s still a decent chunk of change for a not at all extravagant lunch! To go back to Knife, my bill there was just a little more and I drank a bottle of wine, ate three courses, snacks, bread, and much more. So yes, I was more than a little disappointed.

Rating: No medals.

I’ll start with the most important point: Pique-Nique does the finest chicken I’ve eaten in London, and by extension, ever. It has a lovely and extremely French atmosphere, it’s very reasonably priced for what it is, and you will leave happy and full. All you really need to know is that you should go.

But since that would make for a fairly boring review, I’ll go into detail on exactly how they get rotisserie chicken so right, transmogrifying it from a solid but unexciting street food or takeaway option into an ambrosial delight.

First, it’s the chickens. People probably do spend too much time talking about where food comes from, possibly it’s just something to nerd out about and show off what you know. But Bresse chicken is a resounding blow in favour of caring about provenance.

These chickens live 120 days or so, compared to the supermarket standard 42, or 80-odd for the very highest-end free range chicken, making them the free range of free range. They roam around beautiful rolling hills and are deliberately fed only lightly so they seek out insects to eat. And it comes through. They are unimaginably deeply flavoured and delicious compared to regular chicken—a comparison that perhaps comes close is that the breast tastes, throughout, like normal chicken’s crispy skin. And the skin, well!

Second, I think it’s the preparation. Everything is precise and perfect. Properly juicy chicken, presumably from the steady turning on the spit, but coupled with bone dry crispy skin. Maximally creamy and finely riced mashed potato. Served simply with morels and a creamy sauce. Heavily reduced red wine sauce; warm, crispy, chewy, pully-aparty French bread, a clear but powerfully, er, chicken-y consomme. Fluffy chestnut soufflé. You get the idea.

Third, I think it’s the whole approach. Simple, comforting, hearty, delicious. We ate the £41 Bresse chicken tasting menu. You start with a glorious little croquette of shredded chicken with a sweet-sour chutney of some sort, with a cute bone sticking out. Then you get bread with pate—just out of the oven and they keep offering you more until you eventually find a backbone of resistance. If, like me, you abhor liver pate, they just happen to have expertly browned butter in reserve, unmentioned.

Then you get the consomme, which comes with offal on a stick above it. I don’t know if these people are geniuses or if they owe it to their extremely expensive poultry, but the gizzard, heart, and even that wobbly thing on top of the chicken’s head (yes we ate that) were scrumptious, again packed full of savoury depth and punch.

After the consomme you get the aforementioned breast of the chicken. But you’re still going! Soon you are presented with the bouncy, firm thigh and leg and their skin, with a sharply-dressed salad and a shiny and lip-smacking winey jus. I, personally, would confit those chicken legs. I prefer that melt-away soft texture to the more aggressive meaty firmness here, but I’m sure others agree.

You even get to choose what dessert you’d like. We had an entirely anonymous chocolate fondant, no better or worse than one you’d get anywhere, and a glorious chestnut soufflé, totally changing my mind on whether they are just a way to ostentatiously display cooking skills.

For me, chicken has always been a second-tier meat. I believed it was more of a canvas for flavour than the main flavour itself. Well, Pique-Nique shows my old views for the distilled wrongness I now know them to be.

(Two medals.)

You reviewed us on our soft launch with a 50% discount ? You massive, massive prick. The point of a soft launch is to iron out problems, hence the discount. Please go fuck yourself you unprofessional tosser.

Update: Temper’s owner disagreed with our review, and had the above to say. I stand by the review, and think it’s clear that the price/portion offering is not affected by the fact that it was a soft launch. As I said, if the dishes were significantly larger, or significantly cheaper, I would recommend the place. You can decide for yourself.

My dinner at the original Temper, in Soho, was probably my favourite meal of 2016—and I told founder Neil Rankin as much over the bar as he went about chopping and smoking large bits of goat in the restaurant’s shiny and beautiful central kitchen.

But I was not impressed with its new sister restaurant Temper City, and not for any quirks to do with the fact I went during a soft launch. The staff were friendly and efficient, and if some of them were still working on their knowledge of the menu then who cares, that’s what you expect. The kitchen got everything right, I’m sure, and when they didn’t they told us in advance that they were redoing our dishes. These sorts of growing pains are why they charge you half price and even if they didn’t they would hardly bother me.

No, it was the approach in general that didn’t quite come off. It certainly wasn’t bad, but had I paid full price I would have felt a little bit ripped off.

To begin with, I was surprised they had gone for a curry-based concept. I so confidently assumed that it’d be a rerun of the huge-smoked-pieces-of-quality-meat concept in the Soho original that I didn’t follow any of the news around the opening; I just booked as soon as booking lines were opened, and slavered away happily in anticipation. Actually, the curry-ness of the place can be overstated. There’s still a huge smoker and extractor fan in the middle, and they still offer substantial meat chunks with deep smoky flavours.

It was the price-to-portion ratio that confused me most.

These “crab beignet” puff pastries were delicate, expert, and came with a lovely sweet jam and sour cream, or maybe mayo, but they were £8.50! This is for something with almost no substance and the size of a man’s thumb.

The “Korean haggis”—a mix of coarsely minced or finely chopped duck offal with gochuchang, radishes and chillies, was more substantial, and was delicious and fun to eat wrapped in baby gem as well. But it was £12 for two or three solid mouthfuls! Come on!

The curry plates boasted an array of ingredients, and array they did have, but most of them were pointless. The tomatoes were a bit sad, the potatoes were a bit bland, and while the crunchy sweet nutty salad was lovely, I’m not sure how it combined with the others. The paratha was unbelievably pillowy, but there was barely a handful of (really excellent) goat, and we started with little idea of how to combine the ingredients together in more lettuce wraps, hidden under the mint. Plus it was £17. Is this supposed to be a main that fills you up? I think you’d need two of them, making a meal here an incredible indulgence.

The lamb skewers with kimchi were great, but—I know, I’m a broken record—they were £15. One of them was minced lamb (cheap), and while the other had two substantial cubes of lovely meat, it also had two big pieces of kidney (dirt cheap). Is it really unfeasible to offer a third? I can’t deny the loveliness of the sauce, where kimchi was balanced against a mild mayonnaise or some other creamy base.

We opted for peach, condensed milk, and roti for dessert. It’s a good combo, but I’m not sure they’re quite ready with their roti—these seem like the kind of thing that might get better. It was a bit flat; it didn’t have the bouncy life of a (much cheaper, much bigger) one I had at Roti King just weeks ago.

I hate to criticise Temper because I am a huge huge fan of the approach in so many ways. And I even kinda hope this one does well—maybe prices have to be higher in the City. But I won’t be going along at full price. I’ll be going for Sunday lunch at the original spot. (No medals.)

Up until Craft opened, there was absolutely no prospect of an interestingly good meal by the O2 Arena. I mean, that wasn’t the point of the O2, and it’s not clear to me that anyone really minded—events usually start too early to enjoy a proper restaurant meal anyway, you’re perfectly happy to have something cheap and cheerful.

But Craft opened to much aplomb in mid-2015, with a chef whose name was bandied about as if you were supposed to have independently heard of him (well I have now), and it was widely loved. People especially liked taking videos of themselves bashing open the hard clay coating their whole roasted duck—something I’m not criticising as gimmicks really do make things fun. Sadly it’s off the menu at the moment.

Craft does a pretty good job of creating atmosphere despite the fact it’s a three story glass-edged blob plopped in the middle of an empty, windy, usually-empty plaza—the gap between North Greenwich tube and the arena itself. The room was very expensively bedecked by someone who is apparently famous and world-conquering, but it’s not really to my taste: something about it is janky and forced.

We plumped for the £35 short tasting menu—there’s a £55 option as well—which would really be a good deal if the food hadn’t been disappointing: snacks, endless fantastic bread (chewy flatbread straight out of the oven, competent airy sourdough, and cultured fermented-tasting butter), and three courses proper, all solid portions and high end ingredients.

They do everything, seemingly, in-house, which does impress me. The ham was consistently textured in a way that supermarket stuff never does: it didn’t come apart in sections and you could bite right through. The middle one—whipped roe with caviar—was probably the nicest and most interesting thing we ate: that sea floor graininess you are looking for. I honestly can’t remember the third.

The starter was a cheddar custard with crumbs and veg. It was OK—I think I’m biased because I never want my cheese as custard, I want it as cheese. It was a bit like welsh rarebit.

Both of the mains were severely underseasoned and totally unimpressive. Yes, this hake was cooked well, but without seemingly ever being introduced to any salt it tasted of nothing at all. I cannot believe this is just my tastebuds failing me. What’s more, the accompanying veg (with the exception of burnt hispi cabbage, which literally cannot be bad) was just veg, like if you’d scraped out your fridge leftovers and lightly boiled them simply to make up space in a weeknight dinner.

The beef was worse. It was a decent-sized and well-cooked flat iron steak, and it was tender. That’s what I can say in its favour. But it was also drastically underflavoured,and tasted like the grey beef in a school dinner. I didn’t really know you could make high-end beef taste this mediocre. The broth was like a really weak watered stock cube, with a good deal less in the way of punch. It was lukewarm almost immediately. The less said about the random assorted veg the better.

I didn’t finish my dessert. It was extremely bland and commonplace carrot cake that was literally just the ginger cake you buy for £1 in a supermarket. And it came with sour cream. Sour cream! The ice cream was… ice cream. If it was specially home crafted rare milk ice cream it didn’t show.

My companion doesn’t like hazelnut, and they were kind enough to let her pick a different dessert (in fact, the service was extremely good throughout). It was rhubarb jam on some thin, brittle meringue sheets. I just don’t like this kind of meringue, it seems to dry the mouth out with a pervasive sandy dustiness. So take my opinion with a pinch of salt. The rhubarb jam had all the tangy rhubarb flavour seemingly sucked out of it, and could have done with more sweetness.

I had heard only good things about Craft, and every element seemed to have been thought through: design, sourcing, concept, menu, pricing, even website design. But I would not recommend anyone go. Even if a chef had a day off, that’s the sort of quality control that a restaurant charging at least £100 for dinner for two should not accept. I always thought I could guess if a place would be good based only on cues available before you get to the restaurant—I hope this is the exception that proves the rule.

Rating: Avoid.

There are tens of thousands of restaurants in London. Even if you spend an outsized fraction of your disposable income on eating out—as I do—it’s impossible to keep up with more than a sliver of the ones you want to go to most.

I have four or five lists on my phone of the places I want to visit most. And when I discover somewhere particularly good (as Kiln, Smokestak, and Temper all are) I want to go back—not just because it’s a good meal and eating out is a great pleasure, but also because I haven’t tried everything on the menu yet. How can I have reliable opinion if there’s something they cook I have yet to eat.

A huge number of widely-hyped restaurants opened in 2016. I have yet to visit Perilla, Ellory, either iteration of Bao, the new (or any) Barrafina, The Laughing Heart, Padella, Som Saa’s permanent location, Sardine, The Frog, Anglo, The Woodford, or Frenchie, let alone dozens of other, less exciting, but still interesting openings. By next year, I’ll be even further behind.

But I did manage to get to three of those I most wanted to visit, and hopefully you are less obsessively completist than me, and you can simply enjoy these lovely places without worrying you’re missing out on the others.

Kiln, Soho

I was super excited about Kiln. I don’t know what it was that made it so obvious it was going to be great. It’s from people behind the Smoking Goat, which I love, but it wasn’t just that. I was so excited I queued up to go on their first night, when they were offering a free set menu.

Everything was excellent—we started with lamb skewers that were actually better than those at the almighty Silk Road in Camberwell—and it maintained that standard. The fat is jammed together with incredibly tender pieces of protein, grilled above charcoal, and rubbed with cumin and chilli powder. And you pay £2.90 for two of them.

I don’t quite understand how they achieve such reasonable prices (dishes that are basically small mains go in the range £6 to £8, unless they’re using some expensive seafood ingredient). Perhaps it’s the fact there are only a few tables (reservable for parties of 4+) and most everyone else sits at the bar.

They operate a queueing system where you don’t actually have to be there: put your name down and they give you a link to an online counter, showing you how far you are from the front. We went off to have a drink somewhere else in the two hours we had to kill.

Even more challenging dishes work well. River fish is in a gritty, intensely-flavoured broth that somehow tastes like the soily edge of a riverbed… in a good way. You think that the pork belly and brown crab rice noodles—warmly savoury—are good as they are but they come with a sweet and refreshing green sauce (whose provenance I can’t divine) that’s so good you just have to lick its serving bowl clean.

Everything is fantastic. The place is buzzing. Staff are effective and not overbearing. The menu is a delight, changing regularly. Did I say that the pricing is rather competitive. Go asap. (Two medals.)

Temper, Soho

Apparently, everyone else has and had heard of Neil Rankin, the man behind Temper, but I had not. So I did not realise that I was chatting with the proprietor—wearing a red trucker hat—when I ate at Temper. Either way, I’m glad I told him that his eatery was my favourite opening of the year, because it is. It ticks every box that I’ve asked for in a restaurant.

Meat is sold by the 100g, and they tell you the (rare) breed. They put MSG in their ketchup. You can sprinkle bits of fried and ground up pork scratching on your food. They grill large slabs of flesh over basically open fires, in an open kitchen right in the middle of the room. They use animal fats in their vegetable dishes. Their menu fits (easily) on one page. They even base their cocktails around mezcal.

The theme is flatbreads and meat. Basically you buy (smoked, medium rare, tender, extremely meaty) bits of meat, then add sauces and “sprinkles”, sort-of wrap them up, and eat. This, alone, would be enough. But there are also sides—beef fat potatoes utterly covered in raclette cheese was one of the highlights—and in keeping with the theme, starter tacos which range even further (e.g. blowtorched mackerel).

Eating dinner in a restaurant is nearly always a pleasure, but sometimes it’s a glorious all-out reminder of why life is good. My meal at Temper was one of those. (Two medals.)

Smokestak, Shoreditch

Smokestak is an opening in the same vein as Kiln and Temper: long pedigree of previous ventures (in this case, years running a street food stall); widely hyped by the London food crowd; and in possession of a sort-of gimmick. In Smokestak’s case it’s the gigantic, gleaming, smoker in the middle of the room.

I think others have said that Smokestak is London barbecue food coming of age, and I agree. I remember a time when I’d never heard of pulled pork—when I was eighteen and I stumbled into a colonial canteen in the middle of nowhere in Virginia—and totally bowled over by the food. Now, it’s ubiquitous and usually shit. But you can get excellent barbecue in Shotgun, Pitt Cue, and many non-specialist restaurants have smokers and know how to use them.

Smokestak possibly doesn’t do the best brisket in London (although it comes very close, and will serve you a reasonable portion for £8) but it is a very solid all round addition to the scene. Sweet sticky smoky bbq pig tails were crunchy goodness, but my absolute favourite dish was smoked girolles on beef dripping toast. It came in a jus whose deep powerful flavour must have come from litres of stock, reduced to almost nothing. I will go back. (One medal.)